Bellwether

The idea that chaos and significant scientific breakthroughs are connected was first proposed by Henri Poincaré, who had been unable to forget putting his foot on the omnibus step and having it all come clear. The pattern of his discovery, he told the Société de Psychologic, was one of unexpected insight arising out of frustration, confusion, and mental chaos.

Other chaos theorists have explained Poincaré’s experience as the result of the conjunction of two distinct frames of reference. The chaotic circumstances—Poincaré’s frustration with the problem, his insomnia, the distractions of packing for a trip, the change of scenery—created a far-from-equilibrium situation in which unconnected ideas shifted into new and startling conjunctions with each other and tiny events could have enormous consequences. Until chaos could be crystallized into a higher order of equilibrium by the simple act of stepping onto a bus. Or into a flock of sheep.

They weren’t in the hall. They were in the outer office and on their way into Management’s white-carpeted inner sanctum. The secretary flattened herself against the wall to let them pass, clutching her steno pad to her chest.

“Wait!” Management said, putting his hands up as if doing a sensitivity exercise. “You cannot come in here!”

Ben dived to head off the lead ewe, which must not have been the bellwether, because even though he got it stopped at the door and held it there, pushing against its shoulders like a football tight end, the other sheep simply swarmed past it and into Management’s office. And maybe I had misjudged them and they did have brains. They had unerringly headed straight for the part of the building where they could do the most damage.

They did it, tracking in an amount of dirt I wouldn’t have thought their little cloven hooves could carry, leaving a long smear of dirt-laden lanolin on the white walls and Management’s secretary as they brushed past them.

Ben was still struggling with the ewe, which was eager to join the flock, now heading straight for Management’s polished teak desk.

“Endangering the welfare of live animals,” Management said, clambering up on top of it. “Providing inadequate project supervision.”

The sheep were circling the desk like Indians riding around a wagon train.

“Failing to institute proper security measures!” Management said.

“Facilitating potential,” I murmured, trying to get them moving in another direction, any direction.

“These animals should not be in here!” Management shouted from the top of his desk.

The same idea had apparently occurred to the sheep. They set up a pitiful bleating all at once, opening their mouths in a continuous, deafening baa.

I looked sharply at the sheep, trying to spot where the bleating had originated, but it had seemed to come from everywhere at once. Like hair-bobbing.

“Did you hear where the bleating started?” I shouted to Ben, who let go of the ewe, and the sheep were suddenly on the move again, milling randomly through the office and toward the door to the secretary’s hall.

“Where are they going?” Ben said.

Management had clambered down off his desk and was shouting warnings again, looking slightly more dressed-down than before. “HiTek will not tolerate employee sabotage! If either of you or that smoker let these sheep out on purpose—”

“We didn’t,” Ben said, trying to get to the door. “They must have gotten out by themselves,” and I had a sudden image of Flip leaning on the paddock gate, flipping the latch up and down, up and down.

Ben made it to the door as the last two sheep were squeezing through, bleating frantically at the thought of being left behind.

But once in the hall they began milling aimlessly around, looking lost but immovable.

“We have to find the bellwether,” I said. I began to work my way through them, searching for the pink ribbon.

There was a yelp from the end of the hall and a “Blast you, you brainless critter!” It was Shirl, her arms full of papers. “Get out of my way, you fool animal!” she shouted. “How did you get—” She stopped short at the sight of the hallful of sheep. “Who let them out?”

“Flip,” I said, feeling around a ewe’s neck for the ribbon.

“She can’t have,” Shirl said, wading toward me through the sheep. “She’s not here.”

“What do you mean she’s not here?” I said. Two ewes pushed past me on either side and nearly knocked me down.

“She quit,” Shirl said, swatting at the one on the left with her papers. “Three days ago.”

“I don’t care,” I said, pushing at the other one. “Somehow, somewhere, Flip is behind this. She’s behind everything.”

The sheep surged suddenly down the hall toward Personnel. “Where are they going now?” Ben said.

“They have no idea,” I said. “Behold the American public.”

Management emerged from his office, Dockers in disarray. “This sort of behavior is obviously a side effect of nicotine!”

“We have to find the bellwether,” I said. “It’s the key.”

Ben stopped. He looked at me. “The key,” he said.

Management bellowed, “When I find out who’s causing this—this chaos—”

“Chaos,” Ben said, almost to himself. “The key’s the bellwether.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s the only way we can get them back to Bio. You start at this end, and I’ll take the other end. Okay?”

He didn’t answer me. He stood, transfixed, while the sheep milled around him, his mouth half open, his eyes squinting behind his Coke-bottle glasses. “A bellwether,” he said softly.

“Yes, the bellwether,” I said, and it took a long moment for his eyes to focus on me. “Find the bellwether. Think pink,” and I started for the end of the hall. “Shirl, run down to the lab and get a halter and lead.” Something suddenly struck me. “Did you say Flip quit?”

Shirl nodded. “That dentist she met in the personals. He moved, and she followed him. So they could be geographically compatible.” She went back down the hall in the direction of Bio.

The sheep were in the stairwell, milling frightenedly at the edge of the top stair, and it was too bad it wasn’t a cliff. Maybe they’d still fall down it and break their necks—but no such luck. They clambered lightly down a flight and into the hall to Stats. I ran back upstairs. “They’re heading for Stats!” I shouted to Ben.

He wasn’t there. I ran back down the stairs and stopped halfway. In a corner on the floor, thoroughly trampled and very dirty, was the pink ribbon. Wonderful, I thought, and looked up to see Alicia Turnbull glaring at me. “Dr. Foster,” she said disapprovingly.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “None of the Niebnitz Grant winners were ever involved in livestock stampedes.”

“Where is Dr. O’Reilly?” she demanded.

“I don’t know,” I said. I picked up the draggled ribbon. “I don’t know where the bellwether is either. Or what sort of project will win the Niebnitz Grant. I do, however, have a good idea what those sheep are doing to Stats at this very minute, so if you’ll excuse me—” I said, and pushed past her out of the stairwell and into the hall.

At least they can’t do any damage in my lab, I thought, hoping the rest of the doors were shut.

The flock was still in the hall, so they must be. Gina was at the far end, coming out of the stats lab.

“Time for a bathroom break,” she said as soon as she saw them, and ducked through a door.

I started through the sheep, leaning down to lift up their chins and look into their vacant faces for an expression that looked slightly crosseyed or halfway intelligent.

The door opened again. “There’s one in the bathroom,” Gina said. She edged her way down the hall toward where I was gazing into the sheeps’ eyes.

They all looked cross-eyed. I peered anxiously into their long faces, into their vacant eyes, that were born to have an i branded between them.

“There’d better not be one in my office,” Gina said, and opened her door.

“Shut your door!” I said, but too late. A fat ewe was already through it. “Shut it,” I said again, and she did.

The rest of the sheep congregated outside her door, milling and baaing, desperately seeking someone to tell them what to do, where to go. Which must mean the ewe in Gina’s office was the bellwether.

“Keep it there!” I shouted through the door. The ribbon wasn’t strong enough for a leash, but I had a Davy Crockett jump rope that might be. I started for my lab, wondering what had happened to Ben. Probably Alicia had found him and was telling him about her Niebnitz sure thing.

There was a shriek from Gina’s office, and her door opened.

“Don’t—” I shouted. The ewe dived through the door and into the midst of the flock like a card disappearing into a deck. “Did you see where she went, Gina?”

“No,” she said tightly. “I didn’t.” She was clutching a battered pink box. A torn white net ruffle trailed from one corner. “Look what that sheep did to Romantic Wedding Barbie!” she said, holding up a lock of brunette hair. “It was the last one in Boulder.”

“In the greater Denver area,” I said, and went into the stats lab.

All I need now is Flip, I thought, and was amazed she wasn’t there in the stats lab, having quit or not. A sheep was, munching thoughtfully on a disk. I grabbed it out of her mouth, or most of it, pried her large square teeth apart, fished out the remaining piece, and looked squarely into her slightly crossed eyes.

“Listen to me,” I said, holding on to her jaw. “I’ve had all I can take for one day. I’ve lost my job, I’ve lost the only person I’ve ever met who doesn’t act like a sheep, I don’t know where fads come from and I’m never going to find out, and I’ve had it. I want you to follow me, and I want you to follow me now.” I threw the pieces of disk on the floor and turned and walked out of my lab.

And she must have been the bellwether, because she trotted after me all the way down two flights into Bio, and through the lab to the paddock, just like Mary and her little lamb. And the rest of the flock followed, wagging their tails behind them.

I called Billy Ray to come pick the sheep up.

“I’ll send Miguel down with the truck right away,” he said. “I’d come myself, but I’ve got to go down to New Mexico and talk to this rancher about ostriches.”

“Ostriches,” I said.

“They’re the latest thing. Reba’s raising fifty of them on a spread outside Gallup, and ostrich steak’s selling like gangbusters. Lower in cholesterol than chicken and tastes better.”

One of the sheep had gotten itself stuck in the corner of the fence again. It stood there, looking blankly at the fence post like it had no idea how it had gotten there.

“Plus you can sell the feathers and tan the skin for purses and boots,” Billy Ray said. “Reba says they’re going to be the livestock of the nineties.”

The sheep butted its head against the post a couple of times and then gave up and stood there, bleating, a nice object lesson.

“I’m sorry the sheep thing didn’t work out,” Billy Ray said.

Me too, I thought. “You’re getting out of range,” I said. “I can’t hear you,” and hung up.

You can learn a lot from sheep. I went over to the corner and put my hands under its chin and on its rump. “You have to turn around,” I said. “You have to go in another direction.”

I dragged it around to face the other way. It immediately began to graze.

“You have to admit it’s no use and go try something else,” I said, and went back into the lab. Shirl was there. “Where’s Dr. O’Reilly?” I said.

“He was in talking to Dr. Turnbull a minute ago,” she said.

“Good,” I said, and went back up to my stats lab to write up my report for Management.

“Sandra Foster: Project Report,” I typed on a disk the ewe hadn’t eaten.

Project goals:

1. Determine what triggers fads.

2. Determine the source of the Nile.

Project results:

1. Not found. Pied Piper may have something to do with it, for all I know. Or Italy.

2. Found. Lake Victoria.

Suggestions for further research:

1. Eliminate acronyms.

2. Eliminate meetings.

3. Study effect of antismoking fad on ability to think clearly.

4. Read Browning. And Dickens. And all the other classics.

I printed it out, and then gathered up my coat and non-wallet-on-a-string and went up to see Management.

Shirl was there, running a carpet cleaning machine. Management was dusting off his desk, which had been pushed against one corner. “Don’t step on the carpet,” he said when I came in. “It’s wet.” I walked squishily over to his desk. “The sheep are all in the paddock,” I said over the sucking sound of the carpet steamer. “I’ve arranged for them to be sent back.” I handed him my report.

“What’s this?” he said.

“You said you wanted to reevaluate my project’s goals,” I said. “So do I.”

“What’s this?” he said, scowling at it. “Pied Piper?”

“By Robert Browning,” I said. “You know the story. Piper is hired to free Hamelin of rats, does so, but the town refuses to pay him. ‘And as for our Corporation—shocking.’ ”

Management reared up behind his desk. “Are you threatening me, Dr. Foster?”

“No,” I said, surprised. “ ‘Insulted by a lazy ribald?’ ” I quoted, “ ‘You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst, / Blow your pipe until you burst.’ You should read more poetry. You can learn a lot from it. Do you have a library card?”

“A library—?” Management said, looking apoplectic.

“I’m not threatening you,” I said. “Why would I? I didn’t get rid of any rats or find out what causes hair-bobbing. I couldn’t even locate a piper.”

I stopped, thinking about that, and just like the night before, standing in line at Target with the late Romantic Bride Barbie, I felt like I was on the verge of something significant.

“Are you calling HiTek a rat?” Management said, and I waved him away impatiently, trying to focus on my elusive thought. A piper.

“Are you saying—” Management bellowed, and it was gone.

“I’m saying you hired me for the wrong reason. You shouldn’t be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that’s what science is all about. And because the next fad may be the dangerous one, and you’ll find it out with the rest of the flock on your way over the cliff. And no, I don’t need a security escort back to my lab,” I said, opening my purse so he could see inside. “I’m leaving. ‘Up the Hill-side yonder, through the morning,’ ” and I squished my way back across the carpet. “Bye, Shirl,” I called to her, “you can come smoke at my house anytime,” and I went out to my car and drove to the library.

Lorraine was back. “Do you want Your Guardian Angel Can Change Your Life?” she asked me. She was wearing a fairy godmother sweatshirt and sparkly magic wand earrings. “It came in, and so did your book on hair-bobbing.”

“I don’t want it,” I said. “I don’t know what caused it, and I don’t care.”

“We found that book on Browning. You had checked it in after all. Our media organization assistant shelved it with the cookbooks.”

See, I told myself—walking over to Kepler’s Quark and giving my first name to a waitress with chopped-off hair and a waitress uniform that probably wasn’t a uniform—things are looking up already. They found Browning, you never have to read the personals again, and Flip can’t slouch in here to ruin your day and stick you with the check.

The waitress seated me at a table by the window. See, I told myself again, she didn’t seat you at the communal table. She isn’t wearing duct tape. Definitely looking up.

But it didn’t feel like it. It felt like I was out of a job. It felt like I was in love with somebody who didn’t love me back.

He’s totally fashion-impaired, I told myself. Look on the bright side. You no longer have to worry about what caused hair-bobbing. Which was a good thing, because I was pretty much out of ideas.

“Hi,” Ben said, sitting down across from me.

“What are you doing here?” I said as soon as I was able to. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

“I quit,” he said.

“You quit? Why? I thought you were going to work on Dr. Turnbull’s project.”

“You mean Alicia’s statistically-thought-out, science-on-demand, sure-to-win-the-Niebnitz-Grant project? It’s too late. The Niebnitz Grant has already been awarded.”

He didn’t look upset about it. He didn’t look like somebody who’d just quit his job. He looked containedly excited, his eyes jubilant behind the Coke bottles. He’s going to tell me he’s engaged to Alicia, I thought.

“Who won it?” I said, to stop him. “The Niebnitz Grant. A thirty-eight-year-old designed experimenter from west of the Mississippi?”

Ben motioned the waitress over and said, “What have you got to drink that’s not coffee?”

The waitress rolled her eyes. “There’s our new drink. The Chinatasse. It’s the latest thing.”

“Two Chinatasses,” he said, and I waited for the waitress to quiz him on whole vs. skim, white vs. brown, Beijing vs. Guangzhou, but Chinatasses apparently had a lower skill threshold than caffè latte. The waitress slouched off, and Ben said, “This came for you,” and handed me a letter.

“How did you know where to find me?” I said, looking at the envelope. It was blank except for my name.

“Flip told me,” he said.

“I thought she was gone.”

“She told me a while back. She said you hung out here a lot. I came here three or four times, hoping I’d run into you, but I never did. She said you came here looking for guys in the personals.”

“Flip,” I said, shaking my head. “I was reading them for trends research. I wasn’t trying… you did?”

He nodded, no longer jubilant. His gray eyes were serious behind the Coke-bottle glasses. “I stopped coming a couple of weeks ago because Flip told me you were engaged to the sheep guy.”

“Ostrich,” I said. “Flip told me you were crazy about Alicia, that that’s why you wanted to work with her.”

“Well, at least now we know what the i on her forehead stands for. Interfering. I don’t want to work with Alicia. I want to work with you.”

“I’m not engaged to the sheep guy,” I said. I thought of something. “Why did you buy that Cerenkhov blue tie?”

“To impress you. Flip told me you’d never go out with me unless I got some new clothes, and this awful blue was the only thing I could find in the stores.” He looked sheepish. “I also took out an ad in the personals.”

“You did? What did it say?”

“Insecure, ill-dressed chaos theorist desires intelligent, insightful, incandescent trends researcher. Must be SC.”

“SC?”

“Scientifically compatible.” He grinned. “People do crazy things when they’re in love.”

“Like borrow a flock of sheep to keep somebody from losing their grant?”

The waitress plunked down two glasses in front of us, spilling Chinatasse everywhere.

“We need those to go,” Ben said.

The waitress sighed loudly and stomped off with them.

“If we’re going to be working together,” Ben said to me, “we’d better get started.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “We both quit, remember?”

“Well, the thing is, HiTek wants us back.”

“They do?”

“All is forgiven.” He nodded. “They say we can have anything we need—lab space, assistants, computers.”

“But what about the sheep and the secondhand smoke?”

“Open the letter.”

I did.

“Read it.”

I did. “I don’t understand,” I said.

I turned the letter over. There wasn’t anything on the back. I looked at the envelope again. It still only had my name on it. I looked at Ben, who looked jubilant again. “I don’t understand,” I said again.

“Me neither,” he said. “Alicia was there when I opened mine. She had to recalculate all her percentages.”

I read the letter again. “We won the Niebnitz Grant?”

“We won the Niebnitz Grant.”

“But… we aren’t… we don’t…”

“Well, that’s the thing,” he said, leaning across the table and, finally, taking my hand. “I had this idea. You know how I told you chaotic systems could be predicted by measuring all the variables and calculating the iteration? Well, I think Verhoest was right after all. There is another factor at work. But it’s not an outside factor. It’s something already in the system. Remember how Shirl said the bellwether was the same as the other sheep, only a little greedier, a little faster, a little ahead? What if—”

“—instead of butterflies, there’s a bellwether in chaotic systems?” I said.

“Exactly.” He was holding both my hands now. “And it doesn’t look any different from the other variables in the system, but it’s the trigger for the iteration, it’s the catalyst, it’s—”

“Pippa,” I said, clutching his hands. “There’s this poem, Pippa Passes, by—”

“Browning,” he said. “She sings at people’s windows—”

“And changes their lives, and they never even see her. If you were making a computer model of the village of Asolo, you wouldn’t even put her in it, but she’s—”

“—the variable that sets the butterfly’s wings in motion, the force behind the iteration, the trigger behind the trigger, the factor that causes—”

“—women to bob their hair in Hong Kong.”

“Exactly. The trigger that causes your fads. The—”

“—source of the Nile.”

The waitress came back with the same two glasses. “We don’t have cups to go. It pollutes the environment.” She set the glasses down and stomped off again.

“Like Flip,” Ben said, thinking about it. “She misdelivered the package, and that’s how I met you.”

“Among other things,” I said, and felt that feeling again of being on the verge of something, of the Rubik’s cube starting to turn.

“Let’s go,” Ben said. “I want to see what happens when I add the bellwether into my chaos theory data.”

“Wait—I want to drink my Chinatasse, in case it’s the next fad. And there’s something else… You didn’t give HiTek our decision yet, did you, about staying?”

He shook his head. “I thought you’d want to be there.”

“Good,” I said. “Don’t tell them no yet. There’s something I want to check on.”

“Okay. I’ll meet you back at HiTek in a few minutes then,” he said. “Okay?” and went out.

“Umm,” I said, trying to catch the thought I’d had before. Something about trains, or was it buses? And something the waitress had said.

I took a thoughtful sip of the Chinatasse, and if I needed a sign that chaos was reattaining equilibrium at a new and higher level, this was it. It was the Earth Mother’s wonderful spiced iced tea.

Which should inspire me if anything could. But I couldn’t capture the thought. The idea that I should have gone back with Ben kept intruding, and that, except for that sensitivity exercise, and some incidental hand-holding, he had never touched me.

And apparently there was some kind of feedback loop operating in our system because he was back and pushing past the waitress, who wanted to write his name down, and through the tables and pulling me to my feet. And kissing me.

“Okay,” he said, when we pulled apart.

“Okay,” I said breathlessly.

“Wow!” the waitress said. “Did you meet him in the personals?”

“No,” I said, wishing she would shut up and that Ben would kiss me again. “Through Flip.”

“We were introduced by a bellwether,” Ben said, putting his arms around me again.

“Wow!” the waitress said.

Scientific breakthroughs have been triggered by the most minor of events: the sight of bathwater rising, the movement of a breeze, the pressure of a foot on a step. I had never heard of one being triggered by a kiss, though.

But it was a kiss that had the full weight of five weeks of chaotic turbulence behind it, shifting patterns of thought out of their accustomed positions, stirring up the variables, separating and mixing them again into new conjunctions, new possibilities. And when Ben had put his arms around me, it had been like the discovery of penicillin and the benzene ring and the Big Bang all rolled into one. Eureka to the tenth power. Like coming to the source of the Nile.

“This FLIP thing, where you met him,” the waitress was saying, “is it like a recovery group?”

“Discovery,” I said, staring transfixed after Ben, wondering how I could have been so blind. It was all so clear: what triggered fads and how scientific breakthroughs happen and why we had won the Niebnitz Grant.

“Can anybody join this FLIP?” the waitress said. “I’m already in a latte recovery group, but there aren’t any cute guys in it.”

“I need my check,” I said, fishing a twenty out of my purse and handing it to her so I could go back to HiTek and get all this on the computer.

“He already paid,” she said, trying to hand me back the twenty.

“Keep it,” I said, and grinned at her as something else hit me. “We’re rich. We won the Niebnitz Grant!”

I hurried back to HiTek and up to the stats lab, and called up my hair-bobbing model.

Suppose fads were a form of self-organized criticality arising out of the chaotic system of the popular culture. And suppose that, like other chaotic systems, they were influenced by a bellwether. The independence of women, Irene Castle, outdoor sports, rebellion against the war, all of those would simply be variables in the system. They would require a catalyst, a butterfly to set them in motion.

I focused in on the bump in Marydale, Ohio. Suppose that wasn’t a statistical anomaly. Suppose there’d been a girl in Marydale, Ohio, a girl just like everybody else, with flapping galoshes and rouged knees, indistinguishable from the rest of the flock, only a little greedier, a little faster, a little hungrier. A little ahead of the flock. A girl who had had a crush on a dentist on the other side of town and had walked into the barbershop and, with no idea she was starting a fad, that she was crystallizing chaos into criticality, told the barber to cut off her hair.

I called up the rest of the twenties data and asked for geographical breakdowns, and there was the anomaly again, for rolled-down stockings and the crossword puzzle, right over Marydale. And for the shimmy, even though the dance had originated in New York. But it hadn’t become a fad until a bobbed-haired girl in Marydale, Ohio, had picked it up. A girl like Flip. A butterfly. A bellwether. The source of the Nile.

I called up the paintbox and traced the course of events at HiTek again, from Flip’s misdelivering Dr. Turnbull’s package to her fiddling with the latch on the gate, but this time I also fed in Led On by Fate and the bread pudding, Management’s sensitivity exercises, the duct tape, Elaine’s exercises, Shirl’s smoking, Sarah’s boyfriend, Romantic Bride Barbie, and the various skill levels of caffè latte.

All the variables I could think of and every one of Flip’s actions, irrelevant or not, all of them feeding back into the system, adding turbulence, and leading not, as I’d thought after the sensitivity exercise, to disaster, but to the Niebnitz Grant, to love and to geographic compatibility and the source of hair-bobbing. To a new, higher state of equilibrium.

Flip had felt itch, and as a result I had told Billy Ray I’d go out with him, and he’d said he felt itch, too, and told me about the sheep, which I’d thought of when Flip lost Ben’s funding form.

Flip. Her footprints, like Barbie’s sharp little high heels, like the echoes of Pippa’s voice, were all over the crime scene. She had told Ben I was engaged to Billy Ray, she had failed to copy pages 29 through 41, she had taught the bellwether to open the gate, she had told Management about Shirl’s smoking, upping the level of chaos each time, mixing and separating the variables.

The screen filled with lines. I connected them, feeding in the iteration equations, and the lines became a tangle, the tangle a knot. The lost stapler, Browning’s “Pied Piper,” Billy Ray’s cellular phone, po-mo pink. Flip had circulated a nonsmoking petition and Shirl had ended up out in the parking lot in a blizzard and I took her down to Ben’s lab and she watched Ben and me struggle with the sheep and said, “You need a bellwether.”

The screen went dark, layer on layer of events feeding back into each other, and then sprang suddenly into a new design. A beautiful, elaborate structure, vivid with radical red and cerulean blue.

Self-organized criticality. Scientific breakthrough.

I sat and looked at it for a while, marveling at its simplicity and thinking about Flip. I had been wrong. The i on her forehead didn’t stand for incompetence or itch. Or even influence. It stood for inspiration. And she was Pippa after all, only instead of singing she was stirring up the variables, upping the level of chaos with every petition and misdelivered package until the system went critical.

I also thought about penicillin and Alexander Fleming, with his crowded, too-small lab, heaped with piles of moldy petri dishes. The institute he worked in had been right in the middle of chaos—half a block from Paddington Station on a noisy street. Add in the vacation and the August heat and the new research assistant he had had to make room for, and all those tributary details like his father and the rifle team. And water polo. At school he’d been on a team that played a water polo match against St. Mary’s Hospital. Three years later, when he was getting ready to go to medical school, he picked St. Mary’s because he remembered the name.

Add in that, and the soot and the open window of the lab above, and you had a real mess. Or did you?

David Wilson had called the discovery of penicillin “Quite one of the luckiest accidents that ever occurred in nature.” But was it? Or was it a scientific discovery waiting to happen, a system so chaotic that all it would take to push it over the edge into self-organized criticality was a spore, drifting in through an open window like Pippa’s song?

Poincaré had believed creative thought was a process of inducing inner chaos to achieve a higher level of equilibrium. But did it have to be inner?

I saved everything to disk, stuck it in my pocket, and went down to Bio.

“I need to know something,” I asked Ben. “Your bellwether chaos theory. Did you figure it out little by little or did it hit you all at once?”

He frowned. “Both. I’d been thinking about Verhoest and his X factor, and that maybe he was right, and I started trying to think what form another factor might take.”

“And that’s when the apple hit you on the head?”

He shook his head. “Alicia came in to tell me her research showed the next Niebnitz Grant recipient would be a radio astronomer and that Management had called another meeting, and then we had the sensitivity hug and for a couple of days after that all I could think about was you and how you were engaged to that cowboy.”

“Ostrich rancher,” I corrected. “For a couple of weeks, at least. So the ideas were in there percolating, but do you remember what it was that put it all together?”

“You did,” he said. “The sheep were milling around in the hall outside of Management, and you said, ‘Flip did this. I know it,’ and Shirl said she wasn’t there, and you said, ‘I don’t care. Somehow she’s behind this.’ And I thought, No, she isn’t. The bellwether is. And I remembered Flip leaning on the paddock gate, flipping the lock up and down, and I thought, The bellwether must have learned how to open it from her, and led the rest of the sheep into this chaos.

“And it hit me, just like that. Bellwethers cause chaos. They’re the unseen factor.”

“I knew it,” I said. “I have to go find something. Just what I thought. You’re wonderful. Be right back.” I kissed him for inspiration, and went to find Flip.

I had forgotten she’d quit. “Three days ago,” Elaine in Personnel said. She was wearing a pair of Cerenkhov blue Rollerblades. “In-in-line skating,” she said, raising her leg to demonstrate. “It gives a much better full-body workout than wall-walking, and it helps you get around the office faster. Did you hear about Sarah and her boyfriend?”

“They broke up?” I said.

“No. They got married!”

I pondered the implications of that. “Did Flip leave a forwarding address?” I asked. “Or say where she was going?”

She shook her head. “She said to give her check to Desiderata down in Supply and she’d send it on to her.”

“Can I see her file?”

“Personnel records are confidential,” she said, suddenly businesslike.

“Call Management and ask them,” I said. “Tell them it’s me.”

She did. “Management said to give you anything you want,” she said bemusedly, hanging up. “Do you want the whole file?”

“Just her previous work record.”

She skated over to the file cabinet, got it, and skated over to me, executing a neat toe stop.

It was what I’d expected. Flip had worked at a coffeehouse in Seattle, and before that at a Burger King in L.A. “Thanks,” I said, handing it back to her, and then thought of something else. “Let me see her file a minute.” I opened it and glanced at the top line, where it said “full name, last, first, middle initial.”

“Orliotti,” it said. “Philippa J.”

I wrote down Flip’s last name and made a note to find out her grandmother’s maiden name and check to see if she was living anywhere near Marydale, Ohio, in 1921, and went down to Supply.

Desiderata couldn’t find Flip’s forwarding address. “She said she was going to someplace in Arizona,” Desiderata said, looking in among the erasers. “Albuquerque, I think.”

“Albuquerque is in New Mexico,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, frowning. “Then maybe it was Fort Worth. Wherever he went.”

“Who?”

She rolled her eyes. “The dentist guy.”

Of course. He had particularly specified geographic compatibility.

“Maybe she told Shirl,” Desiderata said, rummaging through the pencils.

“I thought Shirl got fired,” I said, “for smoking in the paddock.”

“Hunh-unh,” Desiderata said. “She quit. She said she was only going to stay till they hired a new workplace message facilitation director, and they did that this morning, so maybe she’s already gone.”

She wasn’t. She was in the copy room, fixing the copy machine before she left, but Flip hadn’t told Shirl where she was going either. “She mentioned something about this Darrell moving his practice to Prescott,” Shirl said, leaning over the paper feed. “I heard you and Dr. O’Reilly won the Niebnitz Grant. That’s wonderful.”

“It is,” I said, watching her yank a jammed sheet of paper out of the feed with her fingers. There were no signs of nicotine stains on them. “It’s too bad I don’t know who gives the grant. I had something I wanted to tell them.”

Shirl pushed the feed into position and closed the lid. “I’m sure the committee wants to remain anonymous.”

“If it is a committee,” I said. “Committees are terrible at keeping secrets, and even Dr. Turnbull wasn’t able to find out anything. I think it’s one person.”

“One very rich person,” she said, her voice no longer raspy.

“Right. Somebody circumstantially predisposed to wealth, who thinks for herself and wants other people to, too. When did you quit smoking?”

“Flip converted me,” she said. “Filthy habit. Hazardous to your health.”

“Umm,” I said. “Somebody extremely competent—”

“Speaking of which,” she said, “have you run into Flip’s replacement yet? It’ll make you glad you don’t work here anymore. I didn’t think it was possible to hire somebody worse than Flip, but Management’s succeeded.”

“Somebody extremely competent,” I repeated, looking steadily at her, “who travels around the country like Diogenes, looking for scientists with circumstantial predispositions to scientific discovery. Somebody no one would suspect.”

“Interesting theory,” Shirl said dismissively, centering the paper on the glass plate. “What was it you wanted to tell this person? If he or she is incognito, he or she probably doesn’t want to be thanked.” She hit a button and started to lower the lid.

“Oh, I wasn’t going to thank her,” I said. “I was going to tell her she’s going about things all wrong.”

The copy light flashed blindingly. Shirl blinked. “You’re saying the Niebnitz people picked the wrong winners?”

“It’s not the people you choose. It’s the grant itself. A million dollars means the scientist can quit his job, get a lab all his own, pursue his work in complete peace and quiet.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“Maybe. Look at Einstein. He discovered relativity while he was working in a dinky patent office, full of papers and contraptions. When he tried to work at home, it was even worse. Wet laundry hanging everywhere, a baby squalling on one knee, his first wife yelling at him.”

“And those seem like ideal working conditions to you?”

“Maybe. What if instead of being hindrances, the noise and the damp laundry and the cramped apartment all combined to create a situation in which new ideas could coalesce?” I held up two fingers. “Only two of the winners of the Niebnitz Grant have gone on to make significant discoveries. Why?”

“Scientific discoveries can’t be produced on demand. They take long years of painstaking work—”

“And luck. And serendipity. A breeze blowing Galvani’s frog legs against a railing and closing a circuit, a hand getting in the way of cathode rays, an apple falling. Fleming. Penzias and Wilson. Kekulé. Scientific breakthroughs involve combining ideas no one thought to connect before, seeing connections nobody saw before. Chaotic systems create feedback loops that tend to randomize the elements of the system, displace them, shake them around so they’re next to elements they’ve never come in contact with before. Chaotic systems tend to increase in chaos, but not always. Sometimes they restabilize into a new level of order.”

“Archimedes,” Shirl said.

“And Poincaré. And Roentgen. All of their ideas came out of chaotic situations, not peace and quiet. And if a chaotic situation could be induced instead of us having to just wait for it to happen… It’s just an idea, but it accounts for why dozens of scientists could experiment with electrically discharged gases and never discover X rays. It accounts for why so many discoveries are made by scientists outside their field. Which is why you specified ‘circumstantially predisposed,’ why you choose people working outside their field, because you knew how it worked, even if you didn’t know why. Of course it’s still just an idea. But it fits with Bennett’s theory of the bellwether effect. I’ll need a lot more data, and—”

Shirl was smiling a not-at-all-pinched smile at me. “And you still think I’m going about it all wrong?” she said. She leaned over to pull the copy out of the machine. “Interesting theory,” she said, picking up a stack of papers. “If I ever run into whoever it is that gives the Niebnitz Grant, I’ll be sure to pass it on.” She started out the door.

“Goodbye,” I said, and kissed her on her leathery cheek.

“What was that for?” she grumbled, rubbing at her cheek with her hand.

“Fixing the copy machine,” I said. “Oh, by the way,” I called after her. “Who’s the Niebnitz Grant named after?”

“Alfred Taylor Niebnitz,” she said without turning her head. “My high school physics teacher.”

A theory is only as good as its ability to predict behavior. Mendeleev predicted that the blanks in his periodic table would be filled with elements of certain atomic weights and properties. The subsequent discoveries of gallium, scandium, and germanium bore out his predictions. Einstein’s special theory of relativity correctly predicted the deflection of light by the sun, tested out by the 1919 eclipse. Wegener’s theory of continental drift was corroborated by fossils and satellite photographs. And Fleming’s penicillin saved Winston Churchill’s life during World War II.

The bellwether theory of chaotic systems is just that, and Ben and I are still in the early stages of our research. But I’m willing to hazard a few predictions:

HiTek will switch acronyms at least twice in the next year, establish a dress code, and make the staff hold hands and nurture their inner children.

Dr. Turnbull will spend all of next year attempting to handicap the Niebnitz Grant, to no avail. Science doesn’t work like that.

I predict a number of new fads out of Prescott, Arizona, or Albuquerque or Fort Worth. Boulder, Seattle, and L.A. will fade out as trendsetters. Forehead brands will be big, and dental floss, and bobbed hair, particularly the marcel wave, will make a comeback.

As to the spiritual, angels are out and fairies will be in, particularly fairy godmothers, which, after all, do exist. Merchandisers will make a killing on them and then lose their shirts trying to anticipate the next craze.

I predict a sharp decline in sheep-raising, an increase in weddings, and no change at all in the personals. The hot dessert this fall will be pineapple upside-down cake.

And in some company or research institute or college, an overqualified mail clerk who is overweight or wears fur or carries a Bible will be hired, and the scientists therein would do well to remember their childhood fairy tales.

There will be a sharp upswing in significant scientific breakthroughs, and chaos, as usual, will reign. I predict great things.

This morning, I met Flip’s replacement. I’d gone up to Stats to collect my hair-bobbing data, and she was coming out of the copy room, trailing someone’s memos behind her.

She had lavender hair, arranged in a fountain effect, with several strands of barbed wire wrapped around it. She was wearing a bowling shirt, pedal pushers, black patent tap shoes, and orange lipstick.

“Are you the new mail clerk?”

She pursed her orange lips in disdain. “It’s workplace message facilitation director,” she said, emphasizing every syllable. “And what business is it of yours, anyway?”

“Welcome to HiTek,” I said, and would have shaken her hand except that she was wearing a barbed-wire ring.

Great things.